


Ex Nihilo, Ex Amore, Ex Libris

by AstroGirl



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alpha Centauri - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Creation, Evolution, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, very long time scales
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 22:00:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21736189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: The Earth turned into a puddle of burning goo, and they went off together.  On a world of Alpha Centauri, they make something that becomes something new.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 99
Collections: Genprompt Bingo Round 17, Good Omens (Complete works)





	Ex Nihilo, Ex Amore, Ex Libris

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "natural selection." I think of it as a sort of sequel to my ficlet ["Bugger This for a Game of Soldiers"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19192315), but it can be read perfectly well on its own.

Alpha Centauri's most habitable planet is lifeless.

There are no beasts creeping upon the land, no fish swimming through the seas. No birds in the sky. No trees, no grass, no moss, no insects. Not even a bacterium. Only calm, quiet, wind-swept emptiness.

Which puts it considerably ahead of Earth at the moment. 

There is something to be said, after all, for an absence of fire and blood, of angelic and demonic armies clashing from horizon to horizon destroying everything they touch. Or everything they touch that hasn't already been destroyed. 

There is something to be said for a place where no one is ordering you to kill the only person that you apparently cannot bear to lose.

A great deal to be said, in fact. But still. It is not a place that seems as if it could ever feel like home.

**

"I'm sorry there aren't any good restaurants," Crowley says. 

Aziraphale manages a smile. A laugh is too much to ask for. "No wine," he says. "No automobiles."

"No books," says Crowley. 

"No. Well. I suppose we will have to make do."

"We will," says Crowley. "We will. Here."

He squats. The black robe issued to him by Hell for the war swirls around him in the dry, sterile breeze and transmutes itself into something else. A stylish shirt, tight jeans, snakeskin boots. A blazer. A thing that might be a necktie and might be a scarf. A bit of home. It's a good start.

He digs his fingers into the ground. It can't even properly be called soil. Not yet.

Crowley concentrates with everything that he is, everything he ever has been. Demons aren't supposed to do this sort of thing. But who is here to tell him not to? Who is here to say that he's a demon now, anyway?

There is only one person who could argue the point, and he doesn't. He only watches, his lips parted and something like wonder in his eyes. And that is all that Crowley needs. 

From the earth that is not Earth's, there springs a tree. It erupts from soil now rich and dark, and reaches for the sun. The suns. There are three of them here. Whatever else there might or might not be, there is a great deal of light.

It rises and rises, a tower of yearning life, until they have to crane their necks to see the top. Its branches burst forth leaves, burst forth fruit. Crowley grins, and stands, and plucks an apple. He places it in the angel's trembling palm.

"Crowley," Aziraphale breathes. "Are we...? Are we allowed to do that?" But he takes it, and he eats. And it is good.

**

Their garden expands slowly. It isn't easy creating living things. This is meant to be a task for God Herself. It requires so much imagination, so much willpower, so much devotion. Too much of it at once leaves them shaken and weak. But together they make it happen.

Aziraphale wonders if what they are doing is blasphemous, against the will of God, who left this place barren. Who left Earth barren, too, in the end. Who, perhaps, likes barrenness, for ineffable reasons of Her own.

He decides, in the end, that he does not care. It is the most freeing thought he has ever had.

And so for decades, for centuries, they create. Soil bacteria and oxygen. Flowers and trees. Rodents and insects. They cannot manage anything more complex, anything with a mind complicated enough that it might house a soul. But they have dragonflies again, and roses, and peaches. And from every tree that they have created, they eat.

At the end of each day's labors, they rest in the re-created memory of a bookshop, and drink the re-created memory of wine. It isn't the same as what they've lost. It will never be the same. 

But no one watches them together. No one tells them not to laugh in each other's company, not to touch their hands together, or their lips. No one reminds them what they're supposed to be: evil, good, obedient, bloodless, damned. Enemies. No one tells them anything at all.

And that, too, is something.

**

Time passes, day after day after day.

For immortal beings, they haven't thought much about eternity, about what it really means. About what an eternity in each other's company might mean. But they find ways to pass the time.

They create, and they rest from their creation.

They sleep. Crowley teaches Aziraphale the luxury of it, the decadence of lying in soft blankets at one's ease, the bittersweet indulgences of dreaming. They doze in each other's arms, sometimes for years, comfortable and at peace.

They join their bodies together. Join together their essences, too, those ethereal parts of them created before time. Of course they do.

They talk. They talk about their memories, shared and separate. They talk about the things they did, and didn't do, and might have done, and should have done. They talk of how they feel about it all. Some of these things are hard to speak of. It takes a very, very long time to be able to say them. Fortunately, they have time.

They mourn the things that no longer are, re-create the ones they can, the ones they cannot do without. Aziraphale can make a bookshop, but he cannot recapture six thousand years of human thoughts on paper. Crowley could conjure up a car, perhaps, if he tried, but it wouldn't be the same, and the streets it belonged to are gone forever. These irrecoverable things they remember instead, speaking of them from time to time, until they have spoken of them so many times that merely mentioning their names stands in for an entire conversation.

They argue and make up, argue and make up, until there is no point anymore. Until they have learned each other's arguments so well that they are known before they're uttered, and forgiven before they're known. After enough millennia, they no longer need to speak to each other at all. They still do, though, for the same reasons they still touch.

And time passes, and passes, and passes, until they have been here, in their new home, longer than they were on Earth. Until their time on Earth becomes a drop in the temporal river, a half-forgotten childhood memory, an origin myth.

They are what they are, now. Not of Heaven, not of Hell, not of Earth. Of their world and their garden and their home and each other, only. It isn't what it was, but it is theirs to share, and they are used to it. Perhaps even content. They have accepted that this is their eternity, and that nothing here is ever going to change. 

Except it does, of course. Very, very slowly.

**

They notice it, at first, without realizing its import. These lemons are a little different from the ones we had in the old days, aren't they? Crowley, do you remember making this spiky-leaved plant? Because I don't remember it at all. Look, it's a green mouse! We didn't make any green mice. Must have invented that on their own. Clever little things.

Slowly, slowly, their garden grows out of their control. It spreads, reinvents itself. Becomes new things. Variants on the old. Variants on the variants on the variants. There are things in the world neither of them ever could have imagined. Things delightful and strange. New things to talk about. New things to eat, sometimes. New things to watch as they tumble and chase each other in the grass that isn't quite Aziraphale and Crowley's grass. New fur to stroke. New colors in the petals. New songs in the trees. New shapes and sounds and movements.

And, finally, new thoughts. New words. New questions. New _people_.

**

"Our children," Aziraphale calls them. "Crowley, they're our _children_." Because if not their parents, then what else can the two of them be, except their gods? And, each for his own reasons, they refuse to be that. Never that.

It's hard to know what to do. How much to help them, how much to leave them alone. They think perhaps that was true for human parents, too, back on Earth, so many thousands of millions of days ago.

But they do their best. To pass down knowledge. To share what wisdom they have. 

They do not test them. They do not label them good and evil, forgiven and unforgivable. They do not pretend to know where they go when they die, if they go anywhere at all.

They drink with their children, wine made of a sweet fermented fruit whose ancestor might once have been an apple. They eat with them, delicate morsels spiced with herbs that Earth never knew, held in fingers long and strangely jointed, and covered in soft green fur. 

They collect their children's thoughts, their stories, their poems and songs, until the bookshop becomes a bookshop again.

Sometimes they tell their children who they are. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they intervene. Sometimes they don't. 

But always they watch. Always they marvel. Always they love.

And they swear there will be no Armageddon here.

**

EPILOGUE

The people of Alpha of Centauri have an origin myth. In fact, there are many peoples, and they have many myths. But this is one:

_Somewhere among the stars, the Unknowable God created the world, and people in the world. And she created the white-winged ones and the black-winged ones, to watch over the people of the world, and she called them Good and Evil._

_One of the Evil gave the people of the world knowledge, and one of the Good gave them weapons, and they knew in that moment that they were not Good and were not Evil, but they were the Lovers, who loved the world._

_But before the Lovers were permitted to consummate their love, the Unknowable God, for reasons unknowable, chose to destroy the world in blood and flame, so that even love could not save it._

_But love could make it anew._

_The Lovers came here, to the-world-that-is-now, and here they joined, and from their coupling was born the Tree of Life and Knowledge, from which all may eat. From the tree were born the animals, and from the animals the people, but all were born, ultimately, out of destruction and love._

_The Lovers are eternal, and they walk among us still. Sometimes they are tall and pale and winged. Sometimes they look like us. If you meet them, they might give you wine, might read you poetry, might heal your wounds or give you advice, useful or otherwise. They might be playful and mischievous with you, or kind and gentle. They might give you a smile that is impish, or one that shines like the suns._

_They might do any number of things. But they will not do you harm. For you are their child, and their plans are knowable. What they wish us to know is this: We are free, to make mistakes. To love and hate, to heal and kill. To be the imperfect creatures all of us know that we are and which we cannot help but be. They wish us to know that our future is unknown. It is ours to make. But whatever we choose to do with it, it has no end. It is ours forever._

_Love did not save the first world, but what love has created, love will protect, and wings unseen enfold us always._

_So it is written, in the library in the garden, at the beginning of the world._


End file.
